Category Archives: Cognitive Psychology

When we are presented with random stimuli, we report lower degrees of meaning in life, research shows.

The experience of life as meaningful or purposeful is important as it is associated with a higher quality of life, better self-reported health, better occupational adjustment, better adaptive coping, lower incidence of psychological disorders, slower age-related cognitive decline, and decreased mortality (Heintzelman et al., 2013).

Relief is one of the most common emotions, and it is one of our few basic emotions. Most of our emotions have clear emotional valences. For example, happiness is considered to have a positive emotional valence; anger is considered to have a negative valence; and arousal is considered to have a neutral valence.

Making the right decisions is difficult for many reasons. The focusing-effect is one of them.

When we make decisions, we often get very focused on certain aspects of the decision. This article describes this tendency (=the focusing-effect) in detail and the research surrounding it. Continue reading →

The discussion whether we have free will or not is endless. Some people like to attribute all happenings to environmental or social influences, which reflects a deterministic point of view. Others prefer to look at people as having their own free will, and this implies that we choose our own destinies, not influenced by anything or anyone else than ourselves. Continue reading →

The actor-observer bias is the tendency that people view their own actions as caused by the situational context, while others’ actions are seen as caused by personality or stable dispositions. Continue reading →